> What's preventing Japanese engineers from doing the same?
The fact they don't really need it in their life (or job). English is definitely necessary if you work service jobs in Tokyo (to deal with tourists), but not much anywhere else.
Japanese is one of a handful of languages where one can complete a postdoc entirely within the language. Many languages are not like this. e.g. in the Phillipines, STEM subjects are almost entirely taught in English, since Tagalog simply doesn't have words to describe most of the concepts. The result is something like 90% of the coursework being in English, with random Tagalog words mixed in. The concept is called "Taglish" if I recall correctly.
This is unnecessary in countries like Japan, China, South Korea, etc. If you're applying to a graduate school in Japan (or China, or Korea), expecting to receive education in English is actually the edge-case, not the expectation.
Also, at least in my company, there is an interesting trend where people are deciding learning English isn't really necessary since AI translation has gotten "good enough" for most use cases.
> The result is something like 90% of the coursework being in English, with random Tagalog words mixed in. The concept is called "Taglish" if I recall correctly.
Spoken Tagalog has always impressed me (though I can't really say I know any) for how freely English seems to be mixed in (and well pronounced, such that you notice the difference in phonology), in varying ratios. I'm quite sure there's a deliberate code-switching to it.
> people are deciding learning English isn't really necessary since AI translation has gotten "good enough" for most use cases.
It's honestly really impressive. Although I'm told it can occasionally glitch and treat the text as a prompt instead of just translating it.
> The fact they don't really need it in their life (or job). English is definitely necessary if you work service jobs in Tokyo (to deal with tourists), but not much anywhere else.
But the linked article seems to imply the opposite. I mean, working with an English PM sure sounds like the language is one of the job's core competencies.
I wonder how the figures look for countries outside of the United States.
For what its worth, I ended up getting a tech job in Japan instead. Ironically, the requirements at U.S. startups are much higher, and U.S. startups fit the stereotype of Japanese work culture more than Japanese companies nowadays.
I'd love to see a Japanese version of this. "Bet which of one of JR Chūō Line, JR Saikyō Line, and Tokyo Metro Tōzai Line will NOT get a delay certificate printed today".
Look at you, complaining about your famously on schedule Japanese trains! ;)
Over here in France a train is considered on time if it has up to a 15mn delay. We can ask for a very partial refund only if it has at least 30mn of delay, and we get a voucher to book another train that will also be late.
In my case, the question was "how are you using AI tools?" And trying to see whether you're still in the metaphorical stone age of copy-pasting code into chatgpt.com or making use of (at the time modern) agentic workflows. Not sure how good of an idea this is, but at least it was a question that popped up after passing technical interviews. I want to believe the purpose of this question was to gauge whether applicants were keeping up with dev tooling or potentially stagnating.
To be fair, this topic seems to be quite divisive, and seems like something that definitely should be discussed during an interview. Who is right and wrong is one thing, but you likely don't want to be working for a company who has an incompatible take on this topic to you.
I assume the reason is that `await` de-schedules the current microtask. In fact, even if you immediately return from an `await`, the de-scheduling can introduce behavior that otherwise would be absent without `await`. For this reason, code optimizers (like the Google Closure Compiler) treat `await` as a side-effect and do not optimize it out.
I don't have any specific suggestions, but I do want to give thanks for implementing functionality to block pushes if the email field is *not* using an anonymized mail address.
It's one thing to offer anonymous e-mail addresses, but it's also awesome that GitHub can help prevent mistakes that would otherwise leak a user's e-mail address. I am not sure how many people try to be privacy conscious on GitHub, but I assume most users don't, so it's nice seeing this little feature exist.
It gets more complicated when commit signing, the widely broken web of trust (for the signing key) and similar are involved.
And not all devs want or need anonymity on github.
In general just because information is publicly accessible in some form doesn't make it okay or legal to abuse it (accessible doesn't mean any form of usage rights are transferred to you weather it's in context of GDPR or in context of copy right).
Even more importantly, there's just a lot of people in China. New York City's population is approximately 8.8 million; that is the scale of a mid-sized Chinese city. The population exceeds 1 billion, which is difficult to comprehend in terms of scale. The reference I like to use is: 1 million seconds is ~11 days, whereas 1 billion seconds is ~31 years.
To put it bluntly, China quite literally doesn't need (nor wants) the average software dev on HN. The immigrants they would likely want are those with expertise in much harder technical disciplines (semiconductor R&D etc.)
Yup. To this day, Firefox remains the only browser with a *parallel* CSS engine. Chromium and WebKit teams have considered this and decided not to pursue since it's really easy to get concurrency wrong.
If I recall correctly, the CSS engine was originally developed for Servo and later embedded into Firefox.
Even if made illegal, how does enforcement occur? The United States, at least, is notorious for HR being extremely opaque regarding hiring decisions.
Then there's cases like Japan, where not only companies, but also landlords, will make people answer a question like: "have you ever been part of an anti-social organization or committed a crime?" If you don't answer truthfully, that is a legal reason to reject you. If you answer truthfully, then you will never get a job (or housing) again.
Of course, there is a whole world outside of the United States and Japan. But these are the two countries I have experience dealing with.
The founders of modern nation-states made huge advancements with written constitutions and uniformity of laws, but in the convenience of the rule of law it is often missed that the rule of law is not necessarily the prevalence of justice.
The question a people must ask themselves: we are a nation of laws, but are we a nation of justice?
The parent comment is not presenting a false dichotomy but is making precisely the point that it is how you apply the laws that matter; that just having laws is not enough.
The situation in the US is significantly worse, and probably numerous other countries I haven't experience with. Rather than asking if you've committed a crime, American employers/landlords will do a background check and are liable to turn you down if you've ever been arrested, even if the charges were dropped or you were found not guilty. Comparatively, the reason Japanese employers/landlords may even ask about having committed crime is because they can't find that information on their own freely. This is a fairly ridiculous criticsm, if you ask me. Nobody in any country wants to associate with criminals, often to an unfairly punitive degree, but at least in Japan you are not punished merely for being arrested. And while I don't doubt it happens, it's also far from a universal experience, despite Westerners loving to talk about Japan in broad sweeping generalizations. I have personally never been asked whether I've committed a crime.
One of the ways they keep crime so low. Being convicted destroys your reputation in a country where reputation is extremely important. Everyone loves saying it would be great to have lower crimes like Japan, but very few would really want the system that achieving that requires.
The fact they don't really need it in their life (or job). English is definitely necessary if you work service jobs in Tokyo (to deal with tourists), but not much anywhere else.
Japanese is one of a handful of languages where one can complete a postdoc entirely within the language. Many languages are not like this. e.g. in the Phillipines, STEM subjects are almost entirely taught in English, since Tagalog simply doesn't have words to describe most of the concepts. The result is something like 90% of the coursework being in English, with random Tagalog words mixed in. The concept is called "Taglish" if I recall correctly.
This is unnecessary in countries like Japan, China, South Korea, etc. If you're applying to a graduate school in Japan (or China, or Korea), expecting to receive education in English is actually the edge-case, not the expectation.
Also, at least in my company, there is an interesting trend where people are deciding learning English isn't really necessary since AI translation has gotten "good enough" for most use cases.
reply